An undemanding romance enlivened by an unconventional heroine.
A teacher must educate herself on matters of the heart after she bargains for her future with an ostracized duke.
When she learns that her friend Lucy needs her help, Artemis Jones quits her job at a finishing school and travels to London. While she hopes her presence will make Lucy’s experience of her first season more bearable, Artemis has an ulterior motive: She aspires to find a wealthy and progressive benefactor willing to fund her dream of opening a ladies’ college. And Artemis has another secret: In addition to being a teacher, she’s the author of a series of popular Gothic romance novels. Given her circumstances, Artemis is perhaps the least suitable candidate for Dominic Winters, the widowed duke of Dartmoor, who’s looking for a wife to give him an heir and help handle his teenage daughter, Celeste—but his task is complicated by rumors that he had a hand in his first wife’s death. When Dominic and Artemis find themselves inexorably attracted to one another, they hatch a plan: She will help him reach Celeste, and he will, in turn, fund her school. When the plan leads to a fake engagement and real emotional attachment, Artemis must decide if she trusts the duke enough with her secret identity, and her future. The first installment of the Byronic Book Club series is not only peppered with meaningful references to books by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, but also borrows significantly from their aesthetic. As Artemis negotiates with a Byronic hero, windy moors, and the threat of ruin, she sets herself apart from the heroines who have inspired her with her fierce ambition and lack of inhibition. But even as Artemis emerges as a well-rounded, if slightly indecisive, character, Dominic seldom gets the opportunity to cast aside his solemnity. What Dominic and Artemis’ interactions lack in wit and humor, though, they make up for with heat and sexual chemistry, and their romance unfolds credibly in a skillfully woven plot.
An undemanding romance enlivened by an unconventional heroine.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72824-829-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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